


to catch a fish

by kenopsia (indie)



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M, Tentacles, merman eames
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-17
Updated: 2016-08-17
Packaged: 2018-08-09 09:33:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7796635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indie/pseuds/kenopsia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Don’t spend too much time on the sea,” he said, gruffly, but not without real concern, and it took Arthur several moments to tear his eyes away from his own hands. “You can’t trust anything that doesn’t have to come up for air.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	to catch a fish

**Author's Note:**

> poor a & e are just getting used as a vehicle for me to write merman smut. sorry y'all for bringing dishonor on china.

At eighteen, Arthur was pretty much over school holidays at his father’s house. It was his last summer before he started college in Michigan in august, though, and his mother was in the process of moving in with a man allegedly named “Clegg” who was simultaneously very unhygienic and very tactile. Arthur made the executive decision in that case that spending a summer on the coast seemed like a perfectly lovely alternative to ducking out of sticky, grimy hugs and shoulder grabs for three months.

After being at his dad’s for two days, they’d spent enough “quality time” together, for a given value, that he felt okay on the third night saying, “You mind if I take out the boat in the morning?” over his plate of spaghetti, undercooked in places and too soft in others.

His father was the picture of a 1950s seaman: Ernest Hemmingway in a sailing jacket and Jerry tattoos from wrist to clavicle on both sides. “If you remember the rules and bring her back clean,” he said, after several long moments.

Since Arthur’s mom had left his father over his prioritization of the sea before the two of them, it wasn’t difficult for Arthur to remember the rules, which basically boiled down to: do not capsize the boat, do not crash the boat into the cliffs, do not scuff the glorious polished wood of the boat, and so on.

Arthur nodded, and that was quite enough conversation for one evening.

*

Arthur’s father’s sailboat was a small affair, but he was fond of her nonetheless. He’d been sailing with his father most summers since he was old enough to stay away from his mom for more than three days at a time, and it didn’t take him long to follow the wind to where he wanted to be: just offshore enough that his father’s little house was a tiny shape on his horizon line.

He hummed tunelessly to himself as he threw out an anchor, trying to keep from delving into his cooler so early in the day. He wasted no time peeling off his shirt and making himself comfortable with one of the fishing rods stowed under the seat, baiting it with one of the worms he’d picked out of the compost bin at the house before he’d left.

It was still early morning; the best time to get out onto the sea, the sun a low hanging fruit against the sea, and not hot enough yet to scorch his bare feet against the wood. He sat with his pole for long hours, tempted to doze off again in his chair.

He might have, actually, because something knocked hard against the underside of his boat, and jolted him to awareness. When he jumped to his feet, he realized he might have taken a nap, the sun getting closer to the top of the sky and the tops of his feet pink.

“Wha—” he yelped, as something knocked hard against the other side, making him lurch a few feet with it, embarrassed that he was being caught so off guard, like he’d never had any sea legs. It had to be a turtle, just screwing with him.

He seated himself, again, firmly, and untangled his line, sitting patiently for any sort of activity, eyes keeping track of the mostly placid thrum of water in his immediate line of vision. After an hour, his line gave a little bob, followed by a fierce jolt, and Arthur grinned to himself, lining up his body into the best possible angle to strain against the line. The thing on the end of his hook was strong, incredibly so, and his heart pounded with the thrill of it. If he could hoist it aboard, he was definitely looking at something with at least a hundred pounds of force. He wrestled with it for long minutes, clean sweat running down the center of his back, arms beginning to burn.

At one point, the rod bowed so hard that Arthur started to admit defeat, and almost cut it loose, deciding he would after one more tug, and he flexed hard against the ocean, muttering, “Come on, come on, come on,” in a quiet voice.

His back slammed hard against the back of his seat, and the thing at end of the line came flying at him, slamming into his chest, small and painful, like a baseball. Instead of some great marine vertebrate, or small shark, his hook was pulled through the lip of a fist-sized clam.

“What the f—” Arthur started, frowning as he tried to wriggle his hook out. His line hadn’t been let out nearly long enough to touch the ocean floor, even if the thought of the clam taking the live bait made one iota of sense to begin with.

The full heat of the day had come out to play by then, and Arthur opened a soda while he pondered over the clam. He set it into the cooler, and stared at its tightly closed rim, poking it idly. Which was about the time that he noticed that the shore was no longer a part of his distant backdrop.

 _This is turning out too weird,_ he would have muttered to himself, were he the sort of man to mutter to himself when he was all alone. _It’s time to head home._

He was whipping out his compass to get his bearings to head home, finding west for himself and starting to pull up his anchor when a voice came from below the side of his boat. “Leaving so soon?”

Arthur gave himself whiplash as his attention snapped in the direction of the sound. “Excuse me?”

“Oh, I just hate to lose,” the man treading water idly beside his boat purred. At first glance he seemed almost as young as Arthur, but built with different shapes. Where Arthur was scrawny, the man in the water was sculpted.

“At the risk of repeating myself,” Arthur said, raising an eyebrow, and wishing he was wearing a shirt, suddenly.

Instead of answering, the boy in the water gave him a slow, heated look, starting at the top of his head, wind disturbed hair, down the slope of his face like a caress, sliding past his chest and lingering on the contours of his trunks before fixing his stare at his bare feet, the first to change color from pale to blushing in the sun. Eventually, giving a curved smile, he said, “Well, you’re a pretty thing, for a sandfish.”

Arthur was suddenly not sure if he was supposed to be very confused, or very excited.

“... We’re a little far from shore,” Arthur said, suddenly glad he was tucked up into his waistband. He fumbled for the life preserver, and made a swinging offer. “Do you need…?”

The man in the water shook his head no, still grinning, flinging Arthur with the fine mist of water from his dark hair. “What did you mean about not losing? And did you call me a fish?” _And pretty,_ his penis reminded him. _He also thinks you’re pretty. Ask him to clarify._

His relaxed posture seemed improbable in the ocean, his torso above water from his navel, and his arms mostly stationary. The water seemed to be too dark to make out his legs, but he must not have been moving them too vigorously, or his torso would be bobbing. Arthur almost got lost in the details of his lean, but well defined chest before his reaction brought him back in focus.

The man in the water answered in reverse order: “Yes, because that’s basically what you are. And I can’t tell you, or I won’t _win._ ”

When the man grinned, his smile was wide, wider than most people he knew, and he seemed to have far too many teeth. Arthur felt a chill go up his spine. “Did you swim out here?”

“I did,” he confirmed from the water, grinning like he was enjoying a private joke. “That’s generally how I get where I’m going.”

“Well. Are you sure you don’t want to come —” Arthur offered, but paused when the other man went down briefly, ruffling his own hair underwater as it went under the surface. He came back up newly soaked, glistening and handsome, and with cheeks fat with water, which he promptly emptied with great force and alarming accuracy in Arthur’s face.

“You little _shit!_ ” Arthur cried, grabbing his discarded shirt and pressing it to his stinging eye.

“Winning,” the man declared. He looked so infuriatingly amused.

“Screw you, man,” he said, and went back to pulling up his anchor, as he’d been doing before the stranger arrived.

“Oh, don’t be like that. I’m Eames.”

“Well, Eames, you’re also an asshole, so now I know two things about you.” Arthur huffed, putting all of his strength into pulling on the heavy chain, determined not even to look in his direction, as he gave him nothing but radio silence.

Below him, as he got the anchor closer and closer to the boat, something else came into focus: a golden torso, stark in the dark water, tugging on his anchor like a leash. Arthur looked at where his new acquaintance had been hovering a minute before to find himself alone. He blew out a long breath with a stream of profanities. If this day kicked him in the balls one more time, he was going to have to call his dad to come out and put things right, as embarrassing as that would be.

“Are you kidding me,” he muttered. He still couldn’t make out Eames' legs in the depths of the water, so he figured he was wearing the bottom half of a wetsuit, at least. With a huff, Arthur gave the chain all of the slack, and waited for the other man to get bored.

It didn’t take long. When he broke the surface, Arthur was fuming. “What in hellshit are you winning?” he demanded. “Are you having fun?”

Eames smiled up at him, squinting in the sun. “I’m sorry, mate, help me up and I’ll show you. I just need a ride back to shore.”

Arthur considered saying no, briefly, but he’d already offered to haul him back in once, and now they were even further from shore. Sometimes people swam out further than they should while they were feeling good, and ran out of steam before they realized they should turn around. He wasn’t about to leave this guy to drown, even though he was clearly a tool.

“Alright,” he said, reaching for the spare oar and dangling the broad side for him to grip. “I’ll pull you up.”

Eames gave him a strange look with his shifting, verdigris eyes, and pulled him down instead. Righting himself in the water, he clenched his teeth so hard his ears began to ring.

“The thing is,” Eames said conspiratorially. “I can be as naughty as I want, and you still want me.”

Treading water furiously, Arthur’s foot touched something undeniably slimy. “What is _wrong_ with you?” he snarled, starting to panic, gripping the side of his boat.

“The same thing that’s wrong with you, I suspect,” Eames purred. The way the sun hit his wet hair made it look like an oil spill up close, every turn showing him new shades, and the sound of his voice shook around Arthur’s insides like the sea in a shell. “I’m trying to answer the _call of the ocean._ ”

He’d moved closer, as gracefully as anyone on land, and by the time he’d said, _answer the call,_ he was speaking almost against Arthur’s mouth. Arthur’s heart went into a heated free fall into his stomach, still pumping jackhammer fast. “The call of the ocean,” he repeated, his face soaked but his mouth suddenly dry. He inched his toe towards him again, to clarify that… yes, there was certainly something slimy and scaled where his legs should be.

Eames made an obscene move toward his groin, and Arthur kicked against the water in a reflexive move, his knee coming up between them only briefly as he went back to treading water, but long enough. Eames' hand veered instead to his shoulder, digging the sharp edges of his fingernails into Arthur’s back.

Suddenly, he was on his mouth, not kissing, exactly, because there were too many teeth involved, dragging at his bottom lip, nipping at his top, confusing and slick, and eventually Arthur planted both palms against Eames' wet chest and shoved him away, hard. “You were going to suffocate me.”

“Sorry, I forgot that you breathe through your mouth,” he said with an amused quirk. “Come here. You’re working too hard.”

He pulled Arthur to him, wrapping one hand around the back of his clothed thigh to encourage him, to, what? Straddle his … lap? Arthur had a moment where he realized he could very well be lying on the floor of the boat, sails down and passed out of a heat stroke, fantasizing about screwing a merman.

Either that, or he _was_ bobbing in the water, contemplating screwing a merman. He couldn’t decide which way a sane mind would be hoping.

Either way, he was eighteen and hadn’t been kissed in too long, not since new years, and that was random chance, alcohol, and proximity. Also, he figured the opportunity might never come around again to kiss a merman. He let his cock have the deciding vote, because it had been ready to answer _the call of the sea_ the moment he’d laid eyes on the man, embarrassingly enough.

He moved obediently, wrapping his legs around Eames' waist, and yes, that was immediately much better, as his lungs and legs had a moment to relax. “This is nice,” the merman he was wrapped around said, as Arthur placed a hand on each shoulder to stabilize himself.

“Yeah,”  he agreed, but then thought he should clarify: “Are you going to drown me after we… you know.”

“I hadn’t planned on it,” Eames said, and planted both of his hands on Arthur’s face and reeled him in, slowly, hovering an inch away from his face, seemingly indefinitely, until Arthur got impatient and crashed into him, gripping around his back, kissing and sucking, pulling away to kiss the smooth corner of his lip, and the hard line of his jaw, nuzzling into his neck.

“Ah,” Eames said, and then made a series of unintelligible sounds that went straight to his gut like electricity.

Eames' hands were scrabbling mindlessly between his shoulderblades, and he stopped sucking a trail against his neck to arch his back, pressing his erection inadvertently into Eames' stomach, and the whole embrace was firm and wet and so very exciting. “This might be,” Eames panted, giving the wet fabric of Arthur’s trunks a firm jerk, “better without these.”

Arthur obliged, hastily unwrapping his legs from Eames' torso and starting to fuss at them with hands seemingly turned useless in his excitement and Eames took over, efficiently making short work of the tie and shoving them down as Arthur helpfully treaded water out of them.

“Are you going to want to keep these?” Eames asked.

“Yes!” Arthur huffed. “How else am I supposed to get back into my house?”

“Are your clothes connected to the function of your legs?” Eames looked amused, holding them in one hand and gripped Arthur’s hip with the other, pulling him back flush against him. “Perhaps you should put them back on, because I want these in working condition.”

Arthur let out a short bark of laughter as he wrestled them from the merman’s fingers, tossing them back into his little sailboat. He didn’t look, but was satisfied at hearing them hit the deck with a wet splat.

The sun stirred up the murky depths of Eames' eyes, changing them from forest to moss and seafoam, and he pulled him close again, the way he’d had him before. Between the cold water of the ocean, and firm heat of Eames' stomach against his groin, the heavy touch of the sun against the back of his neck, the strangely fascinating texture of scales against the back of his calves where they were wrapped around him, and the taste of the salty ocean when he leaned down to nibble at the nub of Eames' shoulder, Arthur felt shaken like a mixed drink.

It was nice, being supported, both of Eames' hands resting on the small of his back to keep him pinned close, and now that they were both in the water, Arthur could feel the occasional flicks of his powerful tail. He felt the thrum all the way in the merman’s core against his erection and stiffened even further.

“I know a mermaid who has a particular enjoyment for this altitude, and the muscle reflex that keeps us there.” Eames mused.

“You’ve got … a girlfriend who likes to do it half out of the water,” Arthur said, disbelieving what he was hearing.

Eames made an additional flick of his tail, and Arthur made an embarrassingly needy noise in the back of his throat and gripped him harder with his bare legs.

“Yes,” Eames said finally, after doing it a few more times in rapid succession. Arthur dropped his forehead to Eames' shoulder and panted. “And now a human companion who does as well. I will remember that.”

Eames took one hand and turned Arthur’s head with it and pulled his mouth flush against his own. This time, the action was verifiable a kiss: slick and slow and sweet. Arthur worked one hand into Eames' hair, the texture so strange and soft that his fingers kept slipping right through it. Eames' mouth tasted like the ocean and the tongue of his tongue touched Arthur’s briefly, and his brain went briefly offline.

Arthur ground down against the thick strength of his body with his hips, revelling in the slide between his legs. They were still attached at the mouth, Eames' teeth scraping at his bottom lip and hands clawing at his lower back, and Arthur was dizzy, feelings rising in like champagne bubbles in his bloodstream.

Arthur’s heart was thrashing like a convict, and he sucked a line down to Eames' salty collar, breathing hard through his nose.

“Hey,” he said, suddenly, sitting up ramrod straight.  

“Hey,” Eames repeated, one eyebrow raised.

“What is that?” Arthur wanted to know.

Eames laughed himself breathless, giving a few idle flicks of his tail. Arthur felt the jerk travel through him and swallowed hard.  “What do you think it is?”

“That wasn’t there before,” he frowned.

“It isn’t an external organ,” Eames said, wrinkling his long, pointy nose in amusement. “Can you imagine how dangerous that would be?”

“I don’t have to,” Arthur frowned, looking down at the length of himself, excited as it was to be pressed between the two of them. “It hasn’t been a problem so far. An embarrassment, maybe, when I was fourteen and it rioted every day.”

“Yes, but no one throws metal hooks trying to catch birds when you might have it exposed,” Eames said.

For a moment, Arthur got a very vivid and massively unpleasant mental picture. He shoved it away with a violent shudder.

“Sorry. I didn’t know.”

“It’s okay. You wouldn’t have. _And,_ ” he said, with a malicious glint in his eyes, “I took the liberty of eating your Mackerel.”

“You little...” Arthur grumbled.

“Fish hooks,” Eames reminded him, with a finger curled for emphasis. He twisted his wrist and made a gruesome sound effect.

Arthur shook his head. “My fish is your fish.”

“Back to the task at hand?”

“I killed the mood, didn’t I?” Arthur said, pushing his hair out of his eyes and taking a swipe at his eyes. His face was warm under the sun.

Eames flexed his powerful body at the tail again, a few times. “I think we’ll be just fine,” he said, and rocked into him in a way that felt different from the twitches of his lower body designed to keep them mostly out of the water; this time he felt the blunt nudge against where his gluteal met his hamstring in a slow, wet stroke.

“Oh,” Arthur said, struck dumb and mouth dry.

“No?” Eames checked, momentarily stilled.

Taking inventory of his situation as best as he could will all of his blood evacuating his brain for warmer climates, Arthur noticed a few things. He had gorgeous eyes. The curve of his upper lip was nearly obscene. His ocean slick stomach was hot and firm between Arthur’s thighs.

Arthur felt the roll of anxiety, but also. Something extraordinary was happening to him. It might never happen again.  “Yes,” he said.

Eames gave him a little nod and Arthur’s heart stuttered in his chest when he took one hand from where it had been supporting Arthur at the small of his back and wrapped it around his dick for the first time. Arthur made a faltering noise as his hips shifted, as if surging further into the dexterous grip of Eames' hand.

“What an attractive human,” Eames said on the exhale, sliding his hand down the firm shaft as he held him close, and then back up, wet thumb swiping across the plump head. “I’d keep you like this on display.”

It probably should have freaked Arthur out. Instead he dove back into kissing him thinking, _yes, anything you like._

Eames' hand on him was tortuously slow, and his hips kept trying to follow him. Eames kept smirking into sucking kisses, Arthur could feel it. “Easy,” the merman said when he finally pulled away. For the first time, he looked flushed, pink across the bridge of his nose. Arthur felt a surge of pride and attraction swirl around his stomach that this gorgeous myth looked like that. Because of him.

“Can I—”

Arthur cut him off. “Please,” he said, more like a demand than a question.

Eames grinned, slow and pointy, the gills at his neck fluttering like hopeful eyelashes, and the snaking thing beneath him moved, blunt against his entrance.

“Oh wait, man, I’m not an expert at his but I do think we need to do something, uh,” Arthur said, feeling awkward from his sunburned ears to his salty toes.

Eames laughed and gave his chest a friendly, circular rub on his chest. “Trust me,” he said, and Arthur felt his sexual organ move beneath him again, tentative against his bottom and thought again, thick with lust: _okay._

“Hold on,” Eames demanded, tapping his thigh with one hand to let Arthur know how he expected him to grip, and moved his hands from supporting him to new places, one tangling in his short hair and the other going back to cup his cock, just the tip of which poked out the the water. “You’re going to be fine,” Eames said, giving him a good stroke, and then a second before his own began to breach him, and Eames could feel it was so tapered at the end that it felt like a fingertip stroking him.

“Oh,” he sighed, being braced for something so much more intrusive. Instead, Eames seemed to slide into him like silk, thin appendage stroking him from the inside. “That’s lovely,” he said, voice almost a whisper.

“I know,” he grinned, leaning down to nip at Arthur’s jawline and then give it a satisfying scrape with his bottom line of teeth against it. “I’ll put the other one in soon.”

It took a moment for that sentence to trickle in, and for Arthur to process it.

Arthur almost objected, but it was already the strangest day of his life. Here he was, miles off the coast on a perfect day, intending to catch a fish but instead ended up entwined with the sexiest fairy tale that had ever happened to him. He wondered briefly if he was now completely ruined for sex, regular sex outside of the ocean under perfect, gorgeous blue skies, with people who didn’t have fish tails and perfect eyes. Wondered after that if he’d catch a whiff of the ocean in his forties and get hard. It seemed likely.

Instead, he ground down his hips. “Now seems like a good time,” he suggested with a grin and tweaked Eames' nipple, and then the other. Eames' eyelids, thin enough that Arthur could still see the shape of his iris, went down like gauzy curtains. And all the while that powerful _flick, flick, flick_ of his tail keeping them upright, and Arthur panting.

Arthur took his hands and stroked down Eames' wet, sporadically scaled sides as a second appendage (he wondered what it looked like, because he was starting to suspect his visual brain would call it a tentacle) went in besides the first. The patches of scales were more abundant near the water line, and Arthur dipped his hands under to stroke the silky texture of his lower body.

The second tentacle, for lack of a more specific word, was apparently a heat seeking missile: within a minute of it begin inside of him, and swishing in counterpoint with the other one, it gave a gentle thump against a spot that made him arch: “Oh!” he exclaimed.  

“The other one will catch on in a minute,” Eames said, and at Arthur’s apparent confusion, added: “One is for pleasure, the other is to deposit an egg. And they’ll thicken up in response to the pressure.”

Arthur yawped, caught on the middle bit. “What!” he said, in a short staccato burst.

“Easy, sandfish. Like I said, it’ll catch on in a minute that there’s nowhere for an egg to implant.”

“What if it doesn’t!” he demanded. “This was a terrible idea.”

“It has never happened before,” Eames said, eyes clouding. “I cannot plant a seed in you. Please relax. Your stress levels are causing defence mechanisms to become active. I would be disappointed if our activity was cut short because you caused my nematocysts to fire up.”

“Your… what?”

“You don’t want to know, so _relax,_ ” Eames demanded.

Arthur glared at him, stiff-spined, but the effect was softened as what Eames had predicted happened: the first tentacle stopped doing an aimless exploration and moved against the second, both of them fluttering on tempo against his prostate.

Arthur made a needy whimper. “Alright,” he said, his pelvic floor starting to tighten into a hot coil.

Sensations began to melt into a blur; Eames' hands clawing at the back of his shoulder to pull him close, closer, his tentacles doing friendly acrobatics inside of him, Eames' other hand on his cock, firm and in counterpoint with the movement inside of him, Arthurs own mouth, desperate and suckling, fingers curled in Eames' wet hair, the hot, wet shift between his legs when Eames' tail moved.

Arthur, all the while, rocking his hips into Eames, gripping him tightly between his wet thighs, and he could feel the sweat pooling across the back of his hot shoulders, soothed and energized by the occasional splash cresting against his back.

At the join between Eames' neck and shoulder, below his fluttering, gasping gills, Arthur sucked a mauve patch before he realized it, egged on by Eames' stuttering breath as he was most intent. “I’m sorry, shit,” he said when he pulled up for air and noticed the change in color.

“No, don’t — don’t stop,” the merman groaned, his tentacles inside Arthur plump by then, and moving faster than they had since they started, thrumming inside of him powerfully and in beautiful, rapturous rhythm, stretching with a sweet burn.

Arthur found himself laughing as he bent back down to keep sucking as things got tight, fast. Eames' tentacles inside of him were working on overdrive and his hand was sliding up and down Arthur’s cock, rapidly pulling him towards the free-fall of orgasm. Arthur was determined to bring Eames with him, sucking, grinding, squeezing around them, and then back to Eames' mouth, sucking on his lower lip and pulling away until they weren’t even kissing: just panting in the same place.

Eames came with a jerk inside of him, and both tentacles sat plump but still tucked away as Eames called Arthur’s orgasm out of him with a tender nibble on the side of his neck and a palm on his cock, sweeping up and down and palming the head. “Yeah,” he sighed, and went boneless enough that Eames' strong arms were the only thing keeping him up as his thighs lost his grip and his tentacles retreated.

He did have enough presence of mind to look, then, down between them as Eames' tentacles seemed to go back into his fishlike lower body, like a lizard’s tongue darting back in. Mottled blue-green like the rest of his bottom half, a dizzy mix of color like the sun on algae.

“Wow,” Arthur said, beginning to be able to tread water on his own again. “Can we… will we.” And finally, his brain stopped being as sluggish as his brain and he found the word, the only one he meant. “Again?”

Eames grinned, slow and gorgeous and painted by changing sunlight. He spread his arms to indicate the ocean. “You know where I live.”

*

In the morning, Arthur buttered a hot bagel, standing in his father’s kitchen in his shorts and a loose, sleeveless shirt in a daze, and kept buttering it until it turned cold.

When his father came down, half an hour later, Arthur was still holding the same half of the bagel, still rubbing his knife across it idly. His father gave him an alarmed look. “Don’t spend too much time on the sea,” he said, gruffly, but not without real concern, and it took Arthur several moments to tear his eyes away from his own hands. “You can’t trust anything that doesn’t have to come up for air.”

Arthur had never been so grateful for a sunburn in his life as he felt himself go hot from his face to the tips of the ears. “Understood, sir,” he said, in a stiff voice, but when he met his father’s eyes, he was smiling a secret smile, amused around the corners of his eyes, and a little wistful.

Arthur chose not to examine that closely.


End file.
